This article is transferred from the public number: Director Gang
How much can the audience see on the screen?
Bright or dim lights? Natural or exaggerated?
Is the light glaring or soft? Is it to add color to the actor, or to expose every wrinkle and scar of his?
For a movie to be successful, first of all, the audience must be able to "see" it.
1. Use light as a pen
If the cinematography of a film can be regarded as "good", the most basic requirement is that the lighting on the actor's body should be sufficient, so that the audience can see the actor clearly, and enhance and highlight the characteristics of the actor. In addition to the actors, all the important details of the artistic design can be easily captured by the naked eye, allowing the audience to obtain the visual information they need, including the natural background, artificial environment, props, costumes, and various details that can convey the background and subtext of the story.
Sometimes the details of the art design do not have to be noticed by the audience, but if a room of decorations is carefully selected and hidden in the dark light, then why bother?
Conversely, cinemas have been bustling with bright, but bland comedies, or digitally shots with their own "smooth-motion" effects, that feel like they're watching a live football game — sharp, cold, and unnaturally blurred.
However, today's cameras and lens equipment are already very high-end, and the lighting technology is very advanced, and we rarely see films that are particularly poorly shot. Even if you are a novice, as long as you know how to photography and lighting, even if you only have a smart phone in your hand, you can make a movie with a good picture. But we can still see a lot of films with perfunctory cinematography and no features.
To avoid getting your movie into these "bland" circles, you need to know the origins of the following lighting methods. To help you understand these concepts, a comprehensive list of films is provided for you to explore for yourself.
2. Low-light photography
Studies have shown that the picture of the film has become darker and darker since the 1930s. This trend can be traced back to the period when American cinema began to be influenced by German Expressionist cinema (using minimalist, intense contrasts of light and shadow), wartime newsloids, and Great Depression photography. In 1941, Citizen Kane brought about an innovation in film grammar, with directors Orson Wells, artistic directors Perry Ferguson, and Greg Toland breaking with the tradition of the "Golden Age" of pomp and realism, using black shadows and narrow beams of light to depict this story of Shakespearean customs—self-confidence, loneliness, longing, and loss. The crime thrillers of the film noir period also explore a similar stage drama style of lighting to show the characters' panicked inner world and post-war boredom.
Stills from Citizen Kane
The manipulation of shadows by a photography connoisseur can be as skillful as a genius painter's handling of white space in his work. Gordon Willis, who was in charge of the "Godfather" trilogy, was called the "Prince of Shadows" because he liked to shoot actors in the shadows. For example, in the classic opening scene of "The Godfather", Don Corleone sits in a dimly lit study, while his daughter's wedding is held outdoors in a sunny garden, and the two scenes show Corleone's divided inner world, on the one hand, the dirty criminal business, and the care and love for his family.
The Godfather
Interestingly, the Presidential Team is also photographed by Gordon Willis, with the Washington Post's newsroom shining brightly, while the garage where reporter Bob Woodward and the informant Deep Throat meet is pitch black, with the two scenes juxtaposed in stark contrast. Both Willis and Presidential Team director Alan Pakula like to use shadows, which is the perfect artistic metaphor for an era of deep suspicion and panic.
"Presidential Team"
Today, connoisseurs like Gordon Willis are rare, and low-light photography is becoming a pathetic routine. Big-budget films use it to be deep and serious; independent films use it to save expensive lighting equipment costs. But in either case, low-light photography should follow the same criteria: the hidden visual information should further draw the viewer into the narrative, not force them to dig hard. No matter how strong the emotional effect of the shadow, it should be balanced and dissolved with light from time to time, so as to avoid the pain of swimming in muddy water when we watch the movie.
3. Candlelight
One of the best examples of shading used in recent years. Nothing more than the horror film The VVitch. Directed by Robert Eggers, the film tells the story of a group of British colonists living in North America in the seventeenth century. In the film, all but one indoor scene is shot by photographer Jarin Blaschke in candlelight, and he only uses amber shimmer to reflect the character's face, placing the background completely in thick darkness, and the whole scene looks like a Rembrandt painting.
The picture of "The Witch" is not only good-looking, as the story develops more and more creepy, the hearts of the characters and the audience are tightly strangled by a huge sense of horror, and the film's charming picture plays a certain role in visual and psychological comfort.
The Witch
4. Ambient light
Both Robert Eggers and Harlem Braschke followed in the footsteps of the filmmakers of the seventies: although there were state-of-the-art photographic equipment and lenses, they insisted on using only "available light", that is, natural light illuminated by light bulbs, to give the picture a more straightforward, sincere and unadorned realism.
Some directors, such as Terrence Malik, are particularly fond of using ambient light to create the beauty of the picture. They and the photographer shoot mainly in the "magical moment" – that is, every day just after the sun has set or is about to rise – because the light is the warmest, the most paved, and the best to see. In Malik's Heaven's Day, those picturesque images are the credit of the magic moment photography.
Heaven's Day
The Oscar winner "The Revenant" also fully demonstrated the advantages of magic moment photography, each picture seems to have its own light source, and the production team perfectly captured the original beauty of the western wilderness in winter. It's no surprise that The Revenant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is Terrence Malik's "royal" photographer, having worked on many Malik films such as Tree of Life, Gateway to Wonderland, and Knight of the Holy Grail, all of which were basically shot in ambient light conditions.
The Revenant Hunter
While Lubezki's mastery of using "magic moments" is unquestionable, the use of this technology is also moving to the extreme of over-aestheticization, which increasingly exists to please audiences, providing hype during the film's promotion, rather than serving the film's story.
5. The use of soft light in period films
Lighting is the most expressive of period films: in addition to "Heaven's Day", Robert Altman's "Flower Village" and Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Linden", which tells the story of the chaotic love affair of the eighteenth century, are all highly influential films of the seventies.
Flower Village is classic because Robert Altman and photographer Vilmos Zsigmond created a smoky hazy beauty for this Western set in the northwest of the United States. The dreamlike aesthetic of Flower Village became a visual icon throughout the seventies, so much so that directors like Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Sophia Coppola followed suit when making films of that era.
《Flower Village》
Barry Linden is because most of the scenes were shot by Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott in candlelight (and with the help of a backlight). Barry Linden's elaborate, oil-like set set set the highest standard for later period films and influenced the works of people like Ismail McCant and James Everly, as well as numerous film adaptations of Jane Austen's work.
Barry Linden
6. Break the traditional lighting rules
Soft silhouettes and soft light full of film texture have long been the hallmarks of historical films, and it is bold for filmmakers to break this tradition. People like John Sells, director of "Matewan," and Kelly Reichardt, director of Meek's Cutoff, chose to eschew the soft route and use sharp and realistic tones and visual styles to present historical stories, a manifestation of artistic innovation.
While filming the Edwardian feature film Gosford Park, Robert Altman deliberately broke with the neat, sophisticated visual patterns of traditional period films and chose to present more loose and messy images, making the audience realize that if they did not concentrate, they might miss important details.
"Gosford Manor"
In filming War Horse, a feature film set in World War II, director Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamirnski deliberately made the picture feel like a golden age epic like Gone with the Wind — glamorous, with a distinctly staged feel. This choice is refreshing, and of course there is another important reason for this, which is to recreate the fable-like feeling of the original book. Spielberg and Kaminsky used key lighting, a very classic lighting technique — using focused lighting to hit the actor. Shroud them in a gorgeous, even fairy light.
War Horse
Similarly, Soderbergh has adopted a very flexible lighting technique, and in mainstream blockbusters such as "Erin Brockovich" and "Eleven Arhats" series, he has chosen a regular, classic lighting method, while in relatively low-cost works, he has chosen more casual and not overly demanding aesthetic lighting.
Even if it's filming like The Informant! With a slightly more expensive film like Contagion, he would also break the shackles of traditional lighting rules, hiding the stars in the shadows of the backlight, or using the light from the window or elsewhere to "overexpose" the picture.
In the hands of experienced filmmakers, even if the light "mistake" can enhance the mood and atmosphere of the film, making the whole story more infectious.
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